Start from Seed
Last fall I visited the Johnny’s Selected Seeds Research Farm and saw a clematis vine with the puffy seed heads. I plucked one off and brought it home to try starting a vine from the seeds. After putting them in flats and watering them throughout the winter, nothing happened. Before composting them, I decided to put them on heating mats with my spring seedlings.
Low and behold, they started germinating. Two germinated on the mats, one survived and is about two inches tall now. The other one didn’t make it. I left the flat under the grow lights and I have three more seeds that have germinated and look like they will make it. I’ve tried starting clematis from seed in the past, but never had any luck. I’m thinking that I just haven’t been patient enough. Some of the seeds are just germinating, which means it’s been almost a year that they’ve been in the flat of soil.
I had no idea what the clematis was going to look like, there were no blooms left on the vine when I gathered the seed pod. When I went back two weeks ago I spotted the vine, with blooms:
Will my clematis look like this? Who knows. I’m excited to see what the flowers look like when it does bloom, most likely two years from now. I’ll keep you updated on this fun experiment as time goes on. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my vine will look just like the one pictured above, the yellow blooms are stunning!!!
Do you like to start things from seed?
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Friday Favorite: Hummingbirds
I’ve always loved hummingbird (who doesn’t?). The garden is always filled with things that they will love and we hand a few hummingbird feeders by the windows so we can see them. Lately, one of our hummingbirds has taken to sitting on my rain chain. It’s particularly funny because the rain chain is shaped like little umbrellas (or Humbrellas as we say since our little niece started saying that years ago).
It’s particularly funny since the umbrella is perfectly hummingbird sized.
These little birds are endlessly entertaining. I love sitting on the back porch with my coffee in the morning watching them zoom around. I will always make sure I plant lots of things to keep these little guys fed.
Do you hang a hummingbird feeder in your garden?
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Garden Touring
In our area, there are lots of garden tours. Most of them benefit local land conservation and take place all on one day. My local garden club does a weekly garden tour, where one garden is open each Friday. Since I am in town running errands, I try to stop every week. I always have grand plans of sharing all these lovely gardens with your, but sometimes I get bogged down with work and gardening. Over the coming weeks, I’ll try to get through the backlog of photos and show you some of the lovely gardens I’ve been able to visit this summer. We will kick off with the most recent one I visited, the Belfast EcoVillage.
According to the garden club website “The EcoVillage is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and welcomes the larger community to see what’s now growing on the 40-acre site, formerly part of the Keene Dairy Farm. Resident Marion Brown will have her gardens on display, including a colorful island of evergreen shrubs and ninebark complemented by perennials such as lavender, echinachea and coral bells. With 36 households clustered in the energy-efficient duplexes, Brown says, there’s a wide range of gardening styles that will be interesting for visitors to see.”
It was interesting to walk around the grounds and see the variety of gardens on site. I quite liked the large vegetable garden. It’s always a pleasure to visit the gardens of others to get ideas and inspiration for your own garden. Tomorrow I’ll be touring another garden, trying to find ideas that will work in my own.
